The increasing popularity of the graphics user environment on personal computers and the ease with which word processing and desktop publishing can be implemented in a what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) fashion has made people more aware of the variety of fonts that are available for use in such programs. As people become more knowledgeable about fonts, they begin to recognize that there are subtle differences between fonts that are generally similar in appearance. Further, fonts that are appropriate for newsletters are not appropriate for use in technical documents. Thus, it is important to use the "right" font for a particular application. As a result, avid computer users tend to continually add fonts to their collection and may find that they have literally hundreds of fonts installed on their system.
Keeping all of these fonts installed so that they can be used immediately ensures that a needed font is always available, but also can make the task of selecting a desired font for use in a particular application somewhat daunting. Typically, an application that allows a font to be selected presents the user with a menu of all of the installed fonts from which to make a choice. The difficulty of picking one font from several hundred installed on thc system may be sufficiently frustrating to eventually lead the user to reduce the number of fonts listed when the font menu is selected, by deleting (deinstalling) many of the fonts. The fonts previously installed and then deleted continue to reside as raw font data files on a hard drive of the computer, but they are not installed in the graphics user interface system and thus, are not presented to the user when it is necessary to select a font in an application.
However, there is a significant drawback to dealing with the problem of too many fonts by deinstalling some of them. If after reducing the number of fonts installed, the user subsequently runs an application that requires one of the fonts that was previously installed but subsequently deleted, the user must then reinstall the font. For example, if the user needs to open a document that incorporates one of the deleted fonts that was previously installed, it will be necessary to reinstall the font. However, the deinstallation and reinstallation of fonts can be tedious and inefficient if repeated very often. Alternatively, the user can accept a replacement or substitute font selected by the operating system from among those fonts that are still installed, but the replacement font may be such a poor match to the original font that it is unacceptable. In addition, the replacement font may not produce the same length lines and can cause changes in page breaks.
Clearly, what is needed is a font manager that can provide the user with a short and manageable list of fonts, but not require that fonts excluded from this short list be deinstalled and therefore unavailable when needed by an application. Any application requiring a font that is installed, even though not among the short list presented to the user, should still be provided for use in documents in which that font is specified. For those fonts that are not installed, a replacement font that most closely resembles the required font should be provided. Characteristics of fonts should be defined objectively, so that the user is not forced to rely simply on similar sounding names when selecting a font for a particular use. Furthermore, assistance should be provided to the user in selecting the "right" font for a particular job from among those that are available for use. The present invention addresses these issues.